I admit to a certain leeriness, at times, over the word Zen,despite the fact that I’ve embraced the Eastern wisdom traditions for more than forty years as scholar and practitioner (my practice being rooted in the Hindu-yogic tradition). We simply don’t have a framework in this country to properly assimilate the depth of Zen without stereotyping and trivializing. We often resort to clumsy conflations (assuming if one meditates that one practices “Zen”) or lean on stereotypes (as if trapped in an old episode of Kung Fu).

Still, my initial encounter with the poems of the fourteenth-century Chinese Zen recluse, Stonehouse, remains one of the high holy moments of my life. That was 1987, a year after the first edition of The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse appeared—privately printed with the support of the translator’s friends—from Empty Bowl Press, gorgeously produced with Japanese hand-stitching and uncut pages in leaves. Buying the book, I thought I would read only a few poems before bed that evening. Instead, I stayed up late that first snowy night, by woodstove, becoming acquainted with a poet who would soon become a dear friend.

Now, more than a quarter-century later, Bill Porter, who writes and translates under the name Red Pine, has fully revised his earlier versions of those poems, making a remarkable contribution to both Eastern studies and to the canon of Chinese poetry available in English.

His process mirrors the unfolding of a flower. There was the beautiful first bloom of the Japanese-stitched version, then a period of slow growth when the poems were reissued by Mercury House (1999), and later by Counterpoint Press (2009), both as The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a Fourteenth-Century Chinese Hermit, a volume that combined Stonehouse’s poems with his Zen discourses. Now there is a return to the simplicity of a volume once again of only the poems; though not hand-stitched, the new version includes revisions and extensive commentary—the perfection of the flower returning to its origin, only more beautiful and polished from periods of wind and rain.

Details of Stonehouse’s life are sparse. Born in 1272 in the town of Changshu, near where the Yangtze empties into the East China Sea, Stonehouse received a traditional Confucian education befitting a family of some means. How or when he came to the name Stonehouse, no one knows. It was the name of a cave on YushanMountain, near his hometown. Yushan was known for pine trees, rock formations, and springs, with one—in particular—that flowed out of a cave as large as a house. It was common for an educated man of the period to assume such a name. Some people took several names in the course of their lives, particularly artists and poets.

At twenty, he left the Confucian teachings and became a Buddhist novice, studying with Master Yung-wei. Within three years, he was ordained. Still, he desired further training. One day he took up with a wandering monk for a four- or five-day journey to visit Kao-feng Yuan-miao, a great Zen master. Upon meeting the master, and winning his approval with his response to questions, he stayed with Kao-feng for three years. Unsatisfied in his quest for the Dharma, however, he decided to leave, Kao-feng admonishing him, “You’re still a blind donkey,” recommending another master named Chi-an. Stonehouse stayed with Chi-an for six years. When Chi-an was asked to become abbot at the famous Taochang Temple, Stonehouse joined him a short time later, invited to be the meditation master there. Despite the prestige, after a brief time, Stonehouse, at age forty, decided to return to the mountains, where he built a hut and became a hermit. He lived a hard life, refusing to beg for food like other hermit monks, surviving instead on water and wild plants. He stayed in seclusion for twenty years until 1331 when the Emperor persuaded him, with some urging, to take over as abbot of FuyuanTemple. He gave instruction in Zen for seven years, finally pleading old age to leave his post, returning to the mountains. He then compiled his mountain poems, which included those written in the mountains both before and after those seven years. In autumn 1352, at age eighty-one, he told his disciples he was feeling ill. The following day he told them he was leaving them, and a monk asked for parting words. Stonehouse—in the tradition of Zen masters who would write their “death” poems—picked up a brush and wrote:

Corpses don’t stink in the mountains there’s no need to bury them deep I might not have the fire of samadhi but enough wood to end this family line(121)

He then dropped his brush and died.

Not much else is known of the great master, but the poems survive, supplying insight into the life of a mountain hermit and his depth of practice. One such insight Stonehouse offers is that the path is unique to everyone:

The Way of the Dharma is too singular to copy but a well-hidden hut comes close I planted bamboo in front to form a screen from the rocks I led a spring into my kitchen gibbons bring their young to the cliffs when fruits are ripe cranes move their nests from the gorge when pines turn brown lots of idle thoughts occur during meditation I gather the deadwood for my stove(61)

Here we see the transparency between what Chinese sages refer to as “the world of the ten thousand things” and the inner world of spiritual striving, the “idle thoughts occur[ring] during meditation” also representing the karmic “deadwood” of one’s life that needs to be incinerated in the fires of meditation.

Like other teachers, Stonehouse implores the practitioner to remain steadfast and to not waste time (“Who enters this gate who studies this teaching / has to be thorough and push to the end,” 33). He reinforces this over and again in later poems (“There isn’t much time in this fleeting life / why spend it running in circles,” 61).

Stonehouse’s poems move with the velocity of surrealist association but without dreamlike flourishes. That’s because his perceptions move beyond consciousness and unconsciousness—as binaries—in favor of a new paradigm, what masters refer to as “super-consciousness.” Such perception—seemingly complex and difficult to achieve—is actually simple once one exerts enough effort to shatter the delusion of dichotomy. For Stonehouse, it’s not enough to escape the world. One must bring one’s meditation back into waking existence (opening one’s eyes) so the two become one, a reciprocity flowing freely through a transparent membrane. As he says, “The shame of dumb ideas is suffered by the best / but the absence of intelligence means a fool for sure / . . . I closed my eyes and everything was fine / I opened them again because I love the mountains” (57).

Loving the mountains is central to Stonehouse’s vision. Like other hermit poets (including the T’ang poet Han Shan, or Cold Mountain—to whom Stonehouse refers a few times and who acquired the name by becoming one in spirit with the mountain on which he lived), Stonehouse grew into his name and its metaphorical power through steadfastness and solidity of practice. Unshakeable in his pursuits, he became as solid as a stone house. The cave or “stonehouse” on Yushan stands as a metaphor for his consciousness, which became intimately embedded in and at one with the landscape. The trick for a master (or for anyone) is to stay strong yet flexible. Here, again, Stonehouse complicates dualities of a dichotomous world in favor of perceptions fluid as one breath passing into another, unwedded to seeming opposites like inhalation and exhalation, rain and sun, and morning and night (“Rain soaks my hut then the sun shines / weather can change in the blink of an eye / but not as fast as the breath of existence / at dusk it’s hard to hear the morning bell,” 121).

Red Pine should be commended for decades of service in rendering Stonehouse so lucidly and making him available to new generations of readers. As a translator, he has long been meticulous, devoting significant periods in China’s mountains among hermits. His breadth of work—translations (Poems of the Masters, Copper Canyon Press, 2003, among numerous other volumes of poetry and spiritual texts) along with his own travel writing—is itself impressive. However, his discovery of Stonehouse and now his re-rendering of these poems across several decades speak to the generosity of spirit that accompanies these translations, as do the scholarship and notes that Red Pine provides to enhance understanding and enjoyment.

As it happens, I am completing this review on the night of the Winter Solstice—itself a transitional blurring of boundaries of dark and light, fallings and risings, and endings and beginnings. And by “coincidence,” I am writing at 3:26 a.m., fireside, twenty-seven years almost to the day that I discovered and read Stonehouse’s poems late into the night near a woodstove. I see these twenty-seven years reflected in the number “27” in the middle of his birth-year, “1272,” there between the pause of “1” and “2.” This seems a reminder to remain attentive to cyclic patterns even in the midst of what appears to be a simple linear chronology. These larger cycles are not just “coincidence,” Stonehouse might advise. Separation between this and that is problematic to him. He references in his “death” poem, we will recall, “the fire of samadhi,” samadhi being a state of deep meditation, as Red Pine describes, “where the separation between subject and object disappears” (120). For Stonehouse there is similarly no separation between “one” and “two,” or even between the linearity of time and larger patterns of interconnection (i.e., my writing about Stonehouse twenty-seven years after first discovering him, and the further “coincidence” of doing so in late December and before a fire) in an ever-present now. Such understandings as his don’t just happen without practice and perseverance. The poems of Stonehouse are here to lend insight and to encourage one to remain steadfast on the spiritual path. As he advises—then and now through his poems these centuries later—“better change your ways while you can” (31).